KINOGRAMS!
Today I offer readers one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Edith May Leuenberger met with William Wesley Young during her Ziegfeld experience. Previously, I described how Edith dined twice with a “Mr. Young” when she was in New York City, you can read all about that in Who Was Virginia Whittingham?
The identity of “Mr. Young” matters, because at this stage in William Wesley’s career, he’d served several years working as a British propagandist out of his offices at The Friar’s Club in NYC. William Wesley had stumped for US entry into WWI and helped Jacob Schiff manage NY’s socialist movement through his shepherding of Mischa Appelbaum and The Humanitarian Cult.
“Mr. Young” met with Edith May at a very good time— for him. By October 1920, Mischa Appelbaum had been burned up: his credibility as a socialist leader was prostituted beyond repair. Mounting debts and the death of Schiff lead Appelbaum and his second wife to an abortive suicide attempt at around the time Edith May supped with Mr. Young. Shortly after these meals, Edith May’s syndicated column (ghostwritten by Zoe Beckley) quoted the teen issuing pacifist statements that could have come from Appelbaum’s mouth pre-1916— get the details in Mrs. L’s Battleships. Did William Wesley try to recruit a young girl from his hometown to be his next propaganda mouthpiece?
The answer is almost certainly ‘yes’. Media coverage of Edith May’s National Salesgirls Beauty Contest far outstripped the actual newsworthiness of the event, but no coverage was so peculiar as Edith May’s “Kinograms” coverage. Previously, I’d compared this Kinograms coverage to modern-day BBC coverage. My reason for doing this was that Charles Urban, the founder of Kinograms, was British Intelligence’s “man in American film”. It was Charles Urban who ran London’s silver-screen propaganda offensive designed to pull a reluctant America into their war in Europe. Urban is the man William Wesley would have ultimately worked for when he and Davis Edward Marshall edited their “800,000” feet of “official British government war film” in 1915/16.
Close-up from an undated newspaper advertisement in the collection of the Green County Historical Society. The newspaper is unknown, but is almost certainly the Monroe Evening Times and would have been printed in September/October 1920. Leon Goetz’s Monroe Theater is the hosting institution, the ad reads: “Edith May Leuenberger in “KINOGRAMS” A national weekly film release showing persons from all parts of the world. The big feature of the production is the Salesgirl Beauty contest in which Miss Edith is easily picked as the winner.”
Luke McKernan is the leading scholar following the career of Charles Urban and he kindly sent me a copy of his 2013 book Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897 - 1925. McKernan also served as the editor for a published collection of Urban’s letters, in which he provides a summary of Urban’s war work for the British. It should be noted that Charles Urban, a US citizen, reached out to a foreign government in order to assist that government’s designs to interfere with US politics. Had pro-British interests not gained power in 1917, Urban’s actions would have been identified as sedition. This sort of espionage is now called “active measures”. In McKernan’s words:
War was a potentially awkward time for Urban, who was after all the son of German-Americans. His loyalties were totally with Britain, but he was a man who made enemies and it is surprising that little if anything seems to have been made of his German antecedents, even when some of those enemies were trying to discredit him. But the fact is that he was not impeded in any way in his attempts to interest British propaganda outfits in using film. He originally wrote to Lord Roberts on 31st August 1914, suggesting films be used for recruiting purposes, and receiving the polite reply that recruiting was going very well as it was without films. The need for Britain to promote its cause abroad was gradually being realised, however, and Urban joined the cinema trade's British Topical Committee for War Films while also making contact with the covert propaganda outfit based at Wellington House under Charles Masterman. He employed his always admirable persuasive powers to produce a documentary feature for the Wellington House Cinematograph Committee, entitled Britain Prepared. With some Kinemacolor sequences, and filmed by four cameramen including Urban himself, the feature-length film (first exhibited in December 1915) showed impressive scenes of Britain's military preparedness, and as an American with an assumed understanding of that country's people, he was sent with the film to try and get British propaganda films onto American screens.
The persuasive Charles Urban, courtesy of antikeychop.com
McKernan identifies Charles Urban’s loyalties as being “totally with Britain”, however, I have been told by professionals in the field that once an individual decides to betray his own country, particularly if motivated by money, they very rarely stop at one client. The truth of this observation is borne out by Urban’s subsequent dealing with William Randolph Hearst:
Urban encountered considerable resistance from American exhibitors to How Britain Prepared, as the film was retitled, for reasons as much commercial as political. German-American interests were strongly inimical to showing the British war films, and Urban turned for help to one William Robinson, whose Patriot Film Corporation offered to assist in their effective distribution, but it was an uphill struggle, and Patriot folded with heavy losses. Some in Britain complained that he was failing in his task, unaware of the problems Urban faced and the great efforts he made to counter them. Urban blundered badly, however, when he made an approach to the Hearst organisation regarding a possible distribution deal. William Randolph Hearst was widely seen as being pro-German, and the clear threat was that he could suppress the films once they were under his control. The British press got hold of the story, which was leaked by one of Urban's enemies (he suspected Distin-Maddick). The Wellington House propagandists were extremely embarrassed by the whole affair, especially when Urban loudly protested his innocence and threatened to sue everyone, despite fairly clear evidence that he had indeed contacted Hearst, however innocently. Urban's handling of the British war films was therefore not the success he would have hoped for. Eventually he was rescued by America's entry into the war, and by secure financing for the distribution of the British war films from William K. Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan.
Regular readers of this website will recognize several familiar names in the above: it was Vanderbilt and Morgan women who finessed Lady Duff Gordon’s entree into American retail with her “money dresses”. William Randolph Hearst we met as the 1900-1904 employer of William Wesley Young through his Chicago newspapers, and also as Col. William Selig’s partner in the Selig-Hearst newsreel venture (1915-17), which promoted Feldmarschall von Hindenburg.
Why would an American like Urban reach out to British Intelligence in this way? Urban’s business career was cushioned by money from his second wife, Ada Aline Gorecki. Gorecki’s father was “Polish”— the majority of Poland at this time was in Austro-Hungary— and a polyglot professor of languages at the University of Glasgow. Where her money came from is unclear, yet it is clear that she had a persistent interest in film-men: her first husband was Alexander James Jones “a traveling salesman with the cinematograph and optical firm of Butcher’s & Sons” whom she left to finance Urban.
The mysterious Ada Aline Urban, whose money provided the seed capital for her husband’s cinema companies. She also served as director for said companies.
It was unusual for a wealthy woman in Britain at this time to have such an interest in film, as it was considered a scummy industry with a pronounced ‘porn problem’. Almost all of film’s early investors were involved in pornography in some way, and bordellos were regular clients. In the 1910s, the dominant international organized prostitution network was based out of the Austo-Hungarian (Polish) province of Galicia, and this network was a leading consumer and producer of pornography. Both the Romanovs and the Hapsburgs are known to have employed this pimping network for espionage ends— whether Herbert Asquith in London did too for his nascent MI-6 is an open question, but we do know he was keen to hire Austrians.
Whatever the genesis of Gorecki’s interest in her second husband, Urban’s companies were survivors of the turbulent film industry after WWI. Kinograms was Urban’s attempt to break into the cut-throat “newsreel” film market:
He [Urban] returned to the USA and continued to supervise the distribution of British war films there, largely by including them with film shot by the American Signal Corps in a propaganda newsreel named Official War Review. This was printed by the Kineto Company of America, a new company Urban had formed in November 1917, and distributed by Urban's governmental employers, the Committee on Public Information....
When the war ended, Urban's businesses in London were virtually dormant, and he decided to maintain operations in New York. With his new company the Kineto Company of America, he made every effort to re-establish himself in America along similar lines to his business operation in Britain before the war. In 1919 he co-founded a newsreel with George McLeod Baynes entitled Kinograms, though his subsequent personal involvement seems to have been limited....
Charles Urban puts the world before you… via a surprisingly modern corporate holiday card!
Why MI-6, Wellington House or the Goreckis were interested in Urban has everything to do with the market for information, the aether from which political power is conjured. In the 1910s the pedagogical potential of film was being explored by William Wesley Young, Sigmund Freud’s American lieutenant A.A. Brill, and a whole host of people in Washington with a very tenuous commitment to our experiment in democracy. The most successful names among these celluloid alchemists will be familiar to consumers of American media today, so it’s worth delving into what was going on in the US “newsreel” market in Urban’s day.
According to Raymond Fielding in his book The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911-1967:
…a far more tenacious competitor appeared which rivaled Pathe's leadership. This newcomer was certainly not the first American newsreel, but, as it happened, it was to become one of the most successful of them all. More important, it brought one of journalism's most celebrated names-- that of William Randoph Hearst-- into the motion picture industry as a newsreel producer.
As early as the autumn of 1911, Edgar B. Hatrick, head of photographic services of the Hearst organization, proposed that the company produce a newsreel in competition with the new Pathe and Vitagraph releases… in 1913 he [Hatrick] produced for the Hearst organization a one-reel news film devoted to the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson. The film was released in association with Harry Warner, later of Warner Brothers fame.
During the same period Hatrick, representing the Hearst organization, began negotiations with the pioneer motion picture producer, Colonel William Selig, in an effort to merge the filmmaking and journalistic efforts of the two groups in the production of a motion picture newsreel. … During the same period Selig maintained a close personal friendship with Moses Koenigsberg, then an executive on the Hearst Chicago Evening American. … Finally, early in 1914, arrangements were concluded between the Selig Polyscope Company and the Hearst group for the mutual production of a motion picture newsreel to be called the Hearst-Selig News Pictorial.
I first covered the Hearst-Selig News Pictorial in my post on Imperial German Active Measures and the founding of the National Security Agency (NSA). A good friend of Col Selig’s, Colonel Fabyan, engineered (and most likely milked) this signals analysis organ of the US intelligence community. Fabyan was well connected in Japanese circles, which had sprung to importance after the Russo-Japanese War. Socialist puppet-master Jacob Schiff worked to support the Japanese side of the fighting, while film-based intelligence gathering found its first flowering during the hostilities. Fielding continues with his description of Hearst-Selig News:
Ray Hall was appointed editor. The film was released twice weekly by the Selig Polyscope Company through the General Film Company in competition with Pathe's Weekly, which General also distributed. The first issue was apparently released on Saturday, February 28th, 1914...
With the release of this series the Hearst organization began what was to become a long-term, if sometimes controversial, association with the newsreel business-- an association which survived until the close of Hearst Metrotone operations in 1967. For some reason, however, the early alliance with Selig was short lived and was concluded in December 1915.
I dare say the reason had to do with Selig’s Imperial German financing: despite coming from modest means, Selig never lacked money and the growth of his company— which included the production of intricate film projection machinery— was astounding. No scholarly research into Selig’s career has produced a reasonable explanation for why the colonel was so flush with cash.
After breaking off with Selig, Hearst struggled to find an appropriate partner. In 1915-16 Hearst joined with Vitagraph to release The Heast-Vitagraph Weekly News, which floundered after a few months. Hearst then dropped his name from his company’s newsreel, which was re-titled The International Newsreel. Fielding:
On January 1, 1917, Hearst entered into another production distribution alliance, this time with its rival, Pathe….The Heast name was also dropped from Hearst's own newsreel at this time, [January 1917], apparently because of the controversy over the publisher's alleged pro-German sentiments. A new name, The International Newsreel, was given to the series. … Hearst continued to produce The International Newsreel for many years, releasing it during the 1920s through Universal Studios and, after the introduction of sound, thorugh Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
Col Selig was down, but not out of the newsreel business. Selig partnered with The Chicago Tribune interests, which we met before as the mouthpeice of “progressive”, bellicose Republicans Col. Robert R. McCormick and Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson, who attacked Henry Ford’s peace-lobbying. The expansion of Selig-Tribune echoed Selig’s earlier, mysterious growth :
Following the split with Hearst in Dec 1915, the Selig Polyscope Company continued producing newsreels under a different title. Colonel Selig joined with The Chicago Tribune early in 1916 in the release of a new series entitled the Selig-Tribune, flamboyantly billed as “The World's Greatest News Film.” Herbert C. Hoagland left Pathe to become its general manager, and Lucien C. (“Jack”) Wheeler, a former United States Secret Service agent, was appointed its first editor.
The Selig-Tribune staff expanded rapidly. Within half a year after its appearance seventy-five film technicians were employed in its Chicago plant, and its cameramen were based in Chicago, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, El Paso, Portland, New Orleans and Atlanta.
An additional fifty cameramen, probably so-called stringers (free-lance workers), were reportedly located in London, Paris, Berlin, Petrograd, and other European cities. Despite its early promise and rapid expansion, however, the Selig-Tribune did not survive for long and was apparently no longer in business by 1917.
Like Mutual Film and Thanhouser, Selig Polyscope didn’t survive the Great War— their deaths made way for even more aggressive “active measures”:
Other, better financed, more satisfactorily distributed newsreels appeared on the market and survived....The last of the major successful silent newsreels was introduced in the fall of 1919 by the Fox studios. In time it became one of the most important of all and survived until 1963.
Fox News came on like thunder, the product of great energy, considerable imagination, and an initial investment estimated at five million dollars. Among other things, it was apparently the first American newsreel to affiliate with a wire service-- in this case, United Press. Under the terms of this association, UP gave its wire service exclusively to Fox. In addition ,UP made available to Fox the assistance of its own reporters and photographers around the world...
The first issue of Fox News was premiered on October 11, 1919... Introduction of the Fox newsreel received an unprecedented boost when a letter President Wilson praising introduction of the reel was made public. [sic.] How Fox Studios managed to secure this extraordinary commercial advantage is unknown. Ostensibly, Wilson's letter of commendation was unsolicited.... According to the same paper, this was the first time that a president of the Untied States had given personal attention and comment to a motion picture feature. Wilson's letter was soon followed by equally unprecedented commendations from five Untied States senators, two state governors, and the acting prime minister and the postmaster general of Canada.
By October 1919, Fox was reported to have overseas cameramen and representatives in Yokohama, Tokyo, Shanghai, Peking, Hong Kong, Canton, Manila, Honolulu, Wellington (New Zealand), Sydney, Melbourne, New Guinea, Borneo, Sumatra, Tibet, Russian Siberia, Irkutsk, Manchuria, Alaska, Stockholm, Dublin, Liverpool, London, Copenhagen, Le Havre, Paris, Bordeaux, Brussels, Lisbon, Madrid and Rome. … In 1922, Fox claimed to be served by 1,008 cameramen around the world-- most of whom, of course, were stringers.
Fox News was aggressive in securing exclusive footage of newsworthy events and rushing it to its theaters ahead of the competition. By its own report it resented seventeen uncontested scoops during the year 1921 alone. They included scenes fo Mexican bandit Francisco Pancho Villa on his ranch; Germany's former crown prince in exile;... the first “official” pictures of the Ku Klux Klan.... Less spectacular but substantively more important was a special feature released by Fox in 1922 in several installments on Japan's expansionist policies. Entitled Face to Face with Japan, the series attempted to answer the question, Does war threaten between United States and Japan [sic]?
Japan and the US would go to war after the [anticipated] bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941. (When we come to have our war with China, readers should be aware that US military officers were being groomed for the ‘short legs long arms’ conflict as early as 2004.) Readers will notice that Wilson’s “Fox News” had a geographic focus which mimicked that of “American International Group”, the troubled insurance/investment conglomerate which was born at the same time. In 1939 AIG’s founder Starr would throw his weight behind those Canadian connections which birthed the Office of Strategic Services, an organization orchestrated by the British Security Coordination. The BSC and its American fellow-travellers existed to actively take measures against men like Newell Mecartney. Readers interested in this sad phase of US history may enjoy Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 by Thomas E. Mahl or Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock.
Let’s wrap this up by following the Canadian connection back to Edith May and our anti-hero Leon Goetz. Almost immediately after its founding, Urban’s Kinograms sought refuge in the bosom of the Selznick family, who would gain fame with “Gone with the Wind” in 1939. At the time which Kinograms was lead to the manufactured Edith-May phenomenon, it was already a creature of the Selznicks, who in turn were creatures of investors from that Northern dominion. Fielding:
Another silent newsreel, Kinograms, survived somewhat longer. It was introduced shortly after the close of World War I by Charles Urban and George McLeod Baynes. The reel was originally distributed by the World Film Corporation, which from 1919 onward was owned by Lewis J. Selznick. At one point it came under the control of Associated Screen News, a Canadian-controlled organization which during the early 1920s released a twice-weekly newsreel entitled The Selznick News.
The Selznick News soon disappeared, but Kinograms hung on for a while. Beginning on January 30, 1921, the footage of the Kinograms and Gaumount Weekly newsreels were combined and released by Educational Film Exchanges, Inc., a firm which specialized in providing exhibitors with short subjects.
The name Kinograms was retained for the newsreel, and the staff and operations of the concern were considerably expanded by Educational. Kinograms provided lively competition for the next decade. So good was the newsreel that in 1919, New York's new Capitol Theater, then the world's largest motion picture theater, selected Kinograms as the exclusive news weekly with which to go into business. ….Kinograms' studio closed its doors and went into receivership in 1931.
William Wesley Young’s post 1919 career in film was heavily geared toward the “educational” potential of the medium; Kinograms’ later ownership reflects this same impetus. According to McKernan, Charles Urban was motivated by the same pedagogical spirit in the 1920s:
...With his new [late 1917] company the Kineto Company of America, he [Urban] made every effort to re-establish himself in America along similar lines to his business operation in Britain before the war. In 1919 he co-founded a newsreel with George McLeod Baynes entitled Kinograms, though his subsequent personal involvement seems to have been limited....
Urban began to make grand claims for these films [patched together from his pre-war film library], and for their educational value, claims which gained a certain amount of respect from an American film industry which harboured a secret guilt at the irresistible rise of the fiction film and took notice of a man who was prepared to put money behind his belief that films had a higher purpose.
Late in 1922 Urban moved all of his business interests and his reported library of two million feet of film to a huge building, originally designed by Stanford White, at Irvington-on-Hudson just north of New York, which he had purchased in November 1920 and spent two years turning into a motion picture factory. It was to be the complete plant for his new parent company Urban Motion Picture Industries (formed 1920) and all ancillary activities, and he boldly named it the Urban Institute. It [the institute] was to be the culmination of all of his years as a producer of films. He planned to create a kind of motion picture encyclopaedia, which he called “The Living Book of Knowledge”, offering a library of educational films, as films or as Spirograph disks, to schools and other bodies, bypassing the cinemas (which were by implication ignoring his films). It was hugely ambitious and impressively idealistic, impressive enough to attract a large number of local investors, who provided much of the necessary finance, but who should have thought a little more wisely about what income Urban's activities at that time enjoyed.
By 1924 the institute encountered financial difficulties. Charles and Ada Urban returned to Britain in 1929 but never reclaimed their initial entrepreneurial success— like Mischa Appelbaum, the pair had outlived their usefulness and sunk into impecunious obscurity.
